


Wishes and Prayers and a Limerick or Two

by Project0506



Series: Soft Wars [81]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Friendship, Gen, clone culture, gen - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-12
Updated: 2020-05-12
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:22:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24145075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Project0506/pseuds/Project0506
Summary: Trapper invites a strange mix of friends to his Armoring.Or, alternatively, How Ghosts Walk Tall.
Series: Soft Wars [81]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1683775
Comments: 53
Kudos: 493





	Wishes and Prayers and a Limerick or Two

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [For a Man should Walk Tall](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23628721) by [Project0506](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Project0506/pseuds/Project0506). 



“Alright you karking tube-bottom sludge-spots!” Sgt Barlex bellows. Boil has half a mind to tell him his enthusiasm is both unnecessary and unwelcome, particularly right up next to his left ear. But the bottom of his gut is warmed from the first couple of rounds, he’s got that kid Longshot slowly leaning pretty on his right, and both Wooley and Barlex’s other Parjai Squad reprobate are finding the limits of their alcohol tolerance embarassingly, mockingly quick. He feels _good_ , unwound and unwinding and among brothers.

This was a good idea. He’s not planning to tell Waxer, lest he thinks he should kick him out more often, ordering him to go ‘play with his friends’. The pest.

“Let’s get one thing clear!” Barlex really is too into everything, though. At least for Boil’s taste. Sithstain doesn’t even have the decency to be actually no-joke drunk: he dodges Boil’s kick easy like he’s been doing it all his life. Maybe Boil _is_ getting predictable. Another thing to never tell Waxer. “The General’s a real classy lady, so I better see some _karking respect_ , or I’m gonna shove this exact boot right here _right_ up your-”

“Hi General,” Wooley chirps. He gives an unsteady little finger wave. It makes him look like a little bit of an idiot.

General Kenobi lingers on the edge of their cluster as though not invited. There’s something strange about the way he does it, something odd in the way he’s set himself that pings Boil as different from a vod asking permission. Boil hadn’t ever stopped to consider how a vod would hold himself before, whether or not he was sure of his welcome. It’s just something else they can’t put into words that separates them from the Nat-Borns.

General Kenobi waves back slowly, and tucks his hands into his sleeves like he doesn’t know what to do with them. The lack of conversation around the table is disgustingly, frustratingly, annoyingly awkward.

“Slide on in next to Gearshift, General.” Boil waves a hand both to indicate the kid and to flash his fingers through a threat if they didn’t all start making space _now_. Boil doesn’t have the patience for long, dramatic pauses. And he especially doesn’t have the patience for it today, when the General was just as invited as the rest of them. As if he hadn’t earned his place at this table with blood and ash like the rest of them. “He’s an idiot but he’s not karking scum like the others.”

Wooley leads the indignant protests with gusto, and Boil kind of imagines the smile the General gives them both is grateful. This is already an odd enough bunch: scouts and infantry, a mishmash of ranks and squads with only a single point of commonality between them. Trapper makes friends wherever he goes, from Private Gearshift to General Kenobi.

There’s a rolling shuffle as everyone moves around, leaves a spot for the General at the end next to Gearshift. Longshot’s the keeper of the minichiller on the floor by his side of the booth, and he produces a bottle of something so obviously below the General’s taste Boil is almost ashamed to hand it to him. The General hands something back: glass bottle, liquid clear and dangerous.

“Specialist Trapper said I didn’t have to bring anything,” he admits. “Positively insisted. So I did anyway.” That’s their General! Contrary as any of them. They cheer, Barlex produces cups and they hand around pours.

The infantry boys all sputter on theirs, the karking shinies. Boil holds Barlex’s eyes while he coughs and sips his glass smooth as a sleentail, as scouts do. “Jealousy isn’t attractive, vod,” Boil intones as the General takes his just as easy. Barlex roundly flips him off, and after a second goes ahead and flips the General off too. Kenobi laughs and salutes him with his shitty flimsyplast cup. Wooley follows suit and doesn’t cough. Good, Boil would have had to kill him to maintain scout pride if he had.

It’s late and the Officers’ mess is closed except for them, lights dimmed all throughout except for just over their table and the ones to either side. They’ve got this place all night, a rare stroke of luck Boil had nothing to do with, regardless of the smirk that pod polyp Barlex had shot him at the news.

Boil’s conversation with the Commander had _nothing_ to do with this, and he’d thank you not to accuse such with no proof.

“So I must ask, otherwise the curiosity will eat at me.” Ghost Company’s Commander is a troll, though every one of them to a man do their best to make sure no one else ever finds out. It’s far too hilarious to watch the 501st scramble to try to accuse him of it. What even fewer know is Ghost Company’s Jedi is exactly the same kind of troll.

Kenobi waits until Barlex takes a drink. “How _would_ you know I’m a classy lady?”

Force damn, that liquor went _right_ out his nose! Boil feels the grin cross his face wide enough he’s half surprised it doesn’t crack. Wooley cackles like a madman and Gearshift isn’t far behind. Longshot’s still sober enough to remember that Barlex is absolutely his squad’s senior officer: he keeps his mocking laugh politely contained.

“Alright General, alright,” Barlex says with a smirk and dabs at his face with some of the wipes they’ve got in rolls on the table. “You get that one.” He points threateningly. “Next time, I hit back.”

“You’re quite welcome to try.”

“It’s an inside joke,” Gearshift explains, and keeps _going_ before the General has a chance to feel excluded and thus make Boil have to kill one of his batchmate’s infantry boys. “Lt Crys was in charge of chaperoning the last batch of shinies’ first shore leave on Coruscant. He got a little enthusiastic about describing expected behavior at 79s. Someone got video.”

It was just too bad Crys thought ‘Shame’ grew on that same exotic tree Torrent thought ‘Subtlety’ did. Would have been prime mocking material, otherwise. Still, they’re getting some good distance out of it.

“Everyone here?” a voice calls from the doorway, and as expected the responses roam the spectrum of No’s and insults. “Kark you all too,” Trapper yells cheerfully. “Except the General, I hear he’s a classy lady!”

“You still have to report to me in the morning,” Barlex points out with a grin. He’d always been fond of the mouthy ones. Reminded him of himself, Boil figures.

“I don’t report to you for two days,” Trapper rebuts. He hips open the door and drags the cart in behind him, paint and plastoid rattling on the flatbed. “And that’s precisely why Lt Boil is here. Are you slacking sir?”

Obediently, Boil tops up Barlex’s cup with whatever poison Kenobi brought, and also signals Longshot for another beer. “Hang-overs aren’t medically excusable but alcohol poisoning is,” Boil quotes, glad there’s not a medic at the table. He’s seen them get plenty vicious with that one. “When you wake up you’ll either have forgotten all of this or your testimony won’t be admissible in Tribunal.”

Barlex takes the beer, glares at the rotgut but downs it better than he did the time before. “You know you _could_ just not do anything against regs in front of me.”

Longshot scrambles out to help Trapper unload his armor and paints onto the table, passing little cups and fine detail brushes around. Trapper gives him the fakest pitying look he can manage. “Is _that_ how infantry boys do it? The Safe Play?”

Wooley cackles, and both he and Boil pound their approval into the formaplast table top. General Kenobi snickers, and Longshot and Gearshift simultaneously boo. “You,” Barlex proclaims, “aren’t in any way going to be a karking brat I see.”

It’s a new thing the Commander is trying, one that rumbles have said Torrent has done from the start and has found working overwhelmingly well. The Commander’s reorganizing squads, having specialists run with the squads they’d support. So Barlex adds a scout and a medic to round out Parjai Forward Squad, ones that eat with them, dorm with them, train with them, instead of pulling a stranger whenever there’s an operation.

And Trapper gets put immediately into a squad, so he doesn’t have to return to empty bunks.

Boil is viciously, viciously grateful that Kenobi was there, that he sat next to Trapper in that transport, kept him talking long enough for Boil and Waxer to find them both and pull them from the hot zone. He’d seen what the rest of that transport looked like and his stomach still turns with it.

Boil drains his cup, refills it because infantry might be dumb enough to mix liquors but scouts generally have more use for their brains.

“The point is to write something inside, anything at all you want,” Gearshift is explaining to the General. Kenobi, wisely, rescues the black paint before Gearshift can manage to drip it all down himself and the table. He pours out a measure in each of their little cups and passes it across Gearshift to Wooley.

“It’ll go under the liner,” Trapper takes over. “And I’ll carry it into battle with me.” Trapper isn’t ever shy, is the most outgoing trooper Boil’s ever had the misfortune of liking. But he’s nearly shy when he hands Kenobi his chestplate. “It. Doesn’t have to be anything much,” he demurs, and the way he shifts gives lie to his words. Kenobi meets his eyes, smiles in a way that says he understands.

This, this here is one of the few ways they pray.

Longshot carefully prints the Vode An in neat little letters down Trapper’s new white backplate, Aurebesh on one side and the awful little squiggles of written Mando’a that hurts Boil’s eyes down the other. Boil can’t see what Barlex is writing in Trapper’s helmet, but both times he’s done Boil’s and the once he’s done Waxer’s he’d written a hopeful litany of insults at their enemies’ combat prowess.

Boil takes both bracers, writes out the mind clearing and breathing techniques they’re taught to steady their aim. Gearshift’s gratifyingly sobered over the pauldrons, and Wooley gives the neck guard full concentration.

“And now that all the emotional frippery is over,” Boil says, and hands Trapper his bracers to paint his shell design. He’s got three shades of gold mixed up and he’s snagged a pot of the black as well. He’s well into the designs on his rerembraces, and since he’s got the common sense Force gave scouts, he’s got a quick doodle of what he wants the whole final thing to look like, weighted down by a brush wash on one corner of the table. “On the rest of the gear, you _really_ write anything you want. Insults optional, but highly encouraged.”

Longshot passes out another round, Trapper takes their wish pieces and passes them back other pieces for them to heckle him inside. Wooley asks if Trapper is sure he’s doing gold because his mix has got a bit of orange about it, implies the usual crap about degrading eyes. Trapper stops, looks down and rummages briskly inside the collar of his blacks and withdraws his hand, bird flipped. “How did _that_ get in there,” he drawls, Wooley pelts him with a roll of wipes.

Barlex meets Boil’s eye, raises one very judgmental eyebrow. Boil raises one back. “Before you call my scouts juvenile, you wanna check Gearshift isn’t about to taste that paint?”

They’d grown up together, Barlex and Boil. It’s the only reason he’d let the Commander talk him into letting go of Trapper. It’s also how Barlex knows Boil lies without hesitation whenever it suits him. But. But.

Boil sees the doubt. He slowly lets a smirk grow. Barlex hisses a curse, breaks eye contact to check on his incredibly unimpressed trooper who is clearly not attempting to eat paint.

“Wow sir,” Gearshift deadpans. “The trust here is just amazing. General do you take trade-ins?”

“I’ve heard Crys is free,” the General says, and only a Ghost Company troll would take quite as much pleasure in Gearshift’s disgusted twitch.

“That might be a little too much for me,” he subsides with a grumble. “I guess I’ll have to settle for what I got.”

“Ever run laps hungover Private? With your whole unhappy squad?”

The bickering pings lightning quick around the table, with Longshot nearly lunging over Boil in his attempt to avert his own doom and Wooley chiming in whatever he feels would be the most divisive. General Kenobi is _impressive_ , piping up just when someone looks to be winding down, and winding everyone right back up again. Boil toasts him. Kenobi doesn’t toast back, but his grin is entirely cheeky.

It’s been a good long while since Boil has seen their General this relaxed. He’ll have to talk to Waxer, see what they can do about getting him down with them more often. It looks good for him. Even if Gearshift is forgetting his boundaries and elbows the General rapidly to solicit backup.

Maybe even because of it.

A kneepad primly darts into Boil’s sight line, and when he ignores it it politely taps at his elbow. He ignores that too. It keeps tapping. Trapper taps it up his arm and back down, and Boil ignores him. Trapper knows better than that. “I can do this all day, vod,” Boil sneers.

Trapper stares down the side of his face for a few seconds and Boil ignores him. Enjoys his drink. Reminds Barlex of those old storm runs and gets immediate vociferous objection.

“You’re an asshole sir,” Trapper says as he caves, like they both knew he was going to.

Boil’s spent days coming up with a limerick dirty enough for this, he’s not going to put it on a _kneepad_.

He gets Trapper’s codpiece.


End file.
